General purpose household cleaning compositions for hard surfaces such as metal, glass, ceramic, plastic and linoleum surfaces, are commercially available in both powdered and liquid form. Powdered cleaning compositions consist mainly of builder or buffering salts such as phosphates, carbonates, silicates, etc., and although such compositions may display good inorganic soil removal, they are generally deficient in cleaning ability on organic soils such as the grease/fatty/oily soils typically found in the domestic environment.
Liquid cleaning compositions, on the other hand, have the great advantage that they can be applied to hard surfaces in neat or concentrated form so that a relatively high level of surfactant material is delivered directly to the soil. Moreover, it is a rather more straightforward task to incorporate high concentrations of anionic or nonionic surfactant in a liquid rather than a granular composition. For both these reasons, therefore, liquid cleaning compositions have the potential to provide superior grease and oily soil removal over powdered cleaning compositions.
Nevertheless, liquid cleaning compositions still suffer a number of drawbacks which can limit their consumer acceptability. Thus, they generally contain little or no detergency builder salts and consequently they tend to have poor cleaning performance on particulate soil and also lack "robustness" under varying water hardness levels. In addition, they can suffer problems of product form, in particular, phase instability, inhomogeneity, lack of clarity, or inadequate viscosity characteristics for consumer use. Moreover, the higher in-product and in-use surfactant concentration necessary for improved grease handling raises problems of extensive suds formation requiring frequent rinsing and wiping on behalf of the consumer. Although oversudsing may be controlled to some extent by incorporating a suds-regulating material such as hydrophobic silica and/or silicone or soap, this in itself can raise problems of poor product stability and homogeneity and also problems associated with deposition of insoluble particulate or soap residues on the items or surfaces being cleaned, leading to filming, streaking and spotting.
Importantly, liquid cleaners suffer from the disadvantage that they do not contain abrasives, which contribute substantially to the cleaning performance of many dry-powder household and industrial cleaning compositions. Liquid cleansers that do contain abrasives can suffer from phase instability including layering and abrasive settling. This phase instability problem is aggravated when solvents are present in the cleanser compositions.
Terpenes are, per se, well-known components of perfume compositions and are often incorporated into detergent compositions at low levels via the perfume. Certain terpenes have also been included in detergent compositions at higher levels; for instance, German Patent Application No. 21 13 732 discloses the use of aliphatic and alicyclic terpenes as antimicrobial agents in washing compositions; British Pat. No. 1,308,190 teaches the use of dipentenes in a thixotropic liquid detergent suspension base composition. German Patent Application No. 29 09 690 teaches the use of pine oil (a mixture mainly of terpene alcohols) in liquid hard surface cleaning compositions.
European Application No. 81-200540.3 teaches the use of terpenes with solvents such as benzyl alcohol and ethylene glycol dibutyl ether in liquid cleanser compositions. European Application No. 82-201396.7 teaches the use of terpenes and butyl carbitol (a trademark for 2-(2-butoxyethoxy)ethanol) in a liquid cleanser, optionally with particulate zeolite builders.
However, the use of the combination of selected terpenes, polar solvents, selected surfactant mixture, abrasive with polymeric acrylic acid thickeners and viscosity enhancers disclosed herein does not appear to have been considered, heretofore.